Internet

Another huge MongoDB database leak uncovered

A database containing personally identifiable information on millions of Indians was found lying around, unprotected on the internet, security researchers claim.

Security Discovery's Bob Diachenko said to have found a MongoDB database containing 275,265,298 records on Indians. The information includes names, emails, gender, education levels, area of specialisation, professional skill and functional area, mobile phone number, employment history including the current employer, date of birth and current salary.

Diachenko says he couldn't uncover who was behind the database, as no owner data or affiliation tags could be found. Also, given that the database was hosted on Amazon AWS infrastructure, reverse DNS also showed no results.

“The structure and names of the collections in the database hinted that data was likely collected by anonymous person or organization as part of a massive scraping operation,” he said.

Apparently, the database was first created on April 23 this year. Even though the Indian CERT team was notified immediately, the institution hasn’t reacted until today, leaving enough time for a hacker group to swoop in and drop the database.

Diachenko says a hacking group known by the name ‘Unistelar’ found the database.

“All the content was wiped out,” he added.

Even though it is quite possible that there are plenty of duplicate entries in the database and that it is, in fact, somewhat smaller than initially believed, Diachenko is confident this is still ‘one of the biggest breaches reported in the region’.